


the sugar rush, the constant hush

by kamisado



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Character Study, Drug Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 13:38:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18011936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamisado/pseuds/kamisado
Summary: The scars across his body mark a treasure map of mistakes. Tiny shrapnel scars and rosy-red roadrash, a lifetime of being thrown to the ground by Academy training and the real world. The ivory line tracing across his jaw, almost invisible. The tattoos and the traintracks, the pockmarked puncture wounds scattered like a horrifying constellation across his body.He’s so tired.[a klaus character study]





	the sugar rush, the constant hush

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from 'mary' by big thief. a big thank you to my wonderful beta [luke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustPrettyGay)!
> 
> trigger warnings for: suicide + ideation, gore, child abuse, drug abuse, the usual ua stuff

Klaus loses Ben when they’re both seventeen. Five’s been gone four years now, and the Academy feels fractured, like a fault line runs through their family and the tremors in their actions and their caustic conversations are about to shake them all loose. They’re on the cusp of adulthood, whatever that means, still shoulder-to-shoulder in school uniforms.

Ben’s death is violent, sudden and bloody. Even going by their standards of fucked-up things kids should never see, there’s something so much worse about the way one moment Ben is there, their brother, Klaus’s confidante and best friend. And the next he’s vapor, blood and tissue spatters on their cheeks, distorted scraps of soaked clothing circling around them. Scraps that match their own.

And they can’t mourn there and then, or even begin to react, because the battle’s not over yet, and will it ever be before they’re all a pink mist in the gloaming?

 

* * *

 

Klaus sometimes wonders about his real mother out there, the one who birthed him spontaneously, in a subway carriage, or a swimming pool, or a grocery store. Was she young, a teenager, a student in the first flush of youth? Or someone who’d had kids before, a happy nuclear family torn apart in minutes? Did he have other siblings out there that looked just like him? His robot mom called him Klaus, and that was the only clue he got, which really wasn’t much at all.

He wonders what it would be like in a real family, like the ones he’s seen on TV. All petty squabbles over the remote and playing catch in the yard. But then he remembers that whoever his birth mother _had_ been, she’d sold him to Reginald Hargreeves as a baby. _Fuckin’ cold, Mom._

As a kid that flicker of fiery resentment used to rise up inside him from time to time, but with jaded adulthood, he knows he can’t blame some desperate woman out there for the things his so-called father put him through. Every time Klaus thinks about his birth mother, he can’t help but think about himself and how completely _fucked_ he’d be if he suddenly had a kid out of nowhere.

He knows one thing though. He could never be his father.

That fateful day at thirteen, once he’d screamed himself hoarse, cried so hard he thought he’d never speak again, his knees had buckled and dashed him to the stony ground. He’d traced his fingers over and over the letters in the mausoleum walls, the names of families buried together for eternity, willing them into silence as their screams worked their way into his very soul.

He wonders if the Hargreeves family will all be buried together in the end, side-by-side, one big sick joke.

But Five’s been missing for decades now, and they never found enough of Ben to bury.

 

* * *

 

Their father builds a black iron statue of Ben in the courtyard out back. The world’s in mourning, the media runs newsreels of their victories and the radio plays sad songs back to back. _What will the Umbrella Academy do now they’re down to only four?_

Vultures circling, waiting to pick the bones clean.

It’s become a tradition now in the Hargreeves family, another funeral with no body. They stand in a semicircle round the statue, black umbrellas overhead in the pouring rain. Klaus can’t bear to look up at the figure, his brother and best friend, staring down at him sadly. Luther gives a solemn eulogy about how heroic Ben’s death had been, how honorable, how _brave_. _Sure,_ Klaus thinks bitterly, _but it doesn’t make him any less dead._

The epigraph on Ben’s statue reads _May the darkness within you find peace in the light_ , and Klaus would find it poignant if it wasn’t for the fact that Ben was standing right next to him, scoffing about how it was maybe a bit too on the nose with the Lovecraftian horror and all. Klaus laughs; the extra-strong skunk he’d scored directly beforehand, mixed with the half-bottle of vodka he’d chugged, was really messing with his ability to gauge what was appropriate.

But even now, staring up at the iron figure of his brother, he can’t get the image of Ben’s final moments out of his mind. The instant of his death flickers together with the statue and with the ghost right before his eyes that can’t be there, it can’t be him, it just _can’t-_

Reginald sends him away from the funeral after that, because Klaus just can’t stop fucking _laughing_ at the absurdity of it all, the three iterations of his brother, the murdered, the monolith, and the holy goddamn ghost at his elbow. He has to keep laughing because what the hell else can he do? He can’t stop thinking about the rusty red water in the bathtub as he washed his body clean after Ben’s death, how he couldn’t get the stain out from the porcelain. No amount of pot or booze or nightclub uppers could quiet his mind enough to make the voices stop screaming, to scrub the image of his best friend’s death clean from his mind.

That night Klaus tries heroin for the first time.

 

* * *

 

The flicker of the little TV next to the EMT catches his eye, and the distorted voice of the newscaster tells him his father’s dead. He clutches the IV stand, hands shaking from the drugs, or the shock, he’s not sure. He figures he should feel sad about it, the way he felt after Five disappeared into the ether. Or maybe relief, that the bastard who’d systematically destroyed his childhood would never treat anyone like that ever again. 

But instead he can see a future where his father haunts him at every turn, in person, full-bodied and telling him what a fuck-up he is every time he closes his eyes. And it won’t just be his trauma conjuring that to life anymore, it’ll be his father’s own wretched spirit, torturing him for the rest of his life.

The thought makes him want to fall back into the darkness of unconsciousness, stop his own heart again.

Before the so-called funeral, Klaus finds himself in the kitchen, his father’s urn at his side. The prospect of yet another standoff with the old bastard makes his stomach turn. _What if he never leaves?_

He tips the baggie of pills into his hand; three blue circles topple out. “Three?” The hands of fate must really want to keep him zen today, or maybe just kill him stone dead. Means the same to him anyway. He shrugs, swallows the pills dry, sighs with that familiar bone-deep disappointment. He knows his siblings need him sober if they were to ever have a chance of finding out what happened to their father, but truth be told, Klaus doesn’t give a fuck. The longer he goes without ever facing that awful man again, the better, as far as he’s concerned.

At the third Hargreeves family funeral, Luther punches Ben’s statue to the ground so hard his head pops off, and Klaus reckons that means they’ve come full circle now.

 

* * *

 

Getting kidnapped by Hazel and Cha-Cha reminds Klaus of being a kid again, tied down and sober and silent. That familiar constant thrum of anxiety is now a deafening tattoo as his heart pounds in his ears, the fear crushing his chest like a lead weight. Not even Ben’s soft soothing words can calm him down this time as Klaus tries to gasp around the duct tape. 

He’d broken his jaw at twelve, accidentally pitched down the stairs headfirst and landed with a sickening crack. His father ordered his mother to wire his mouth shut.

His siblings make jokes about it, even now, the blessed silence, but the terror still tore him awake in the middle of the night, grotesque mutilated faces and hands reaching, clawing at him, flayed bloody. He’d wrench upright, crying out in the night for someone, _anyone,_ to come in and hold him, to tell him everything was going to be alright.

Before the fall, the noise would alert Ben. He’d sneak in from the room opposite, and hold Klaus’s hand until the panic subsided, until his breathing slowed back to normal.

But the nightmares still persisted, and for eight long weeks, he couldn’t even fucking scream.

 

* * *

 

He’s free. All he can think about is the fact that he _made it out_ and, okay, he’s semi-nude and bleeding on a bus home, and there might be two bloodthirsty assassins out there looking to hurt him and his family, but he’s _free.  
_

He thinks, _God, I hope there’s money in this suitcase._

He thinks, _Nothing but money._

And then he doesn’t think about anything at all as the blue light disintegrates his body and he’s thrown into hell.

 

* * *

 

Klaus knows he’s a total wreck, between the strong dope that’s surprisingly easy to get his hands on out here, and the endless access to booze. What’s worse is that he knows how he’s survived so long out here. It’s not just that Dave’s watching out for him here and there: _don’t piss off Lt. Peters, it’s not worth it,_ and _Gardener can hook you up with anything you want._ It’s more that it’s programmed into his bones, the way he doesn’t flinch when orders are barked at him, the snatches of sleep here and there in between days and days of marching, or worse, grueling calisthenics. Even the sick sounds of bones crunching and men screaming get faded into white noise soon enough. 

No matter how much of his childhood he pushed back against good ol’ Daddy Hargreeves, what passed for their education is etched so starkly in his mind that its inescapable. The basic rules of combat, how to sneak up on the enemy, the constant aggression, the humiliation. Even through the haze of every drug humming through his system, Klaus snaps into the routine of it all better than half the people around him.

He still feels that awful sickening dread the first time he kills someone, the first time he fires and the bullet actually makes its target. Some poor sonofabitch collapses and falls, and Klaus almost drops his gun from trembling when he realizes what he’s done.  A handful of the new recruits around him can’t stand it; he finds them curled up, weeping behind sandbags.

But it’s not the first time he’s killed someone, and he just can’t shake that thought from his mind. He and his siblings have been taking down the ‘bad guys’ since they were old enough to walk. But what does that make him? Although his superiors chew him out over the drugs, they can’t fault him as a recruit otherwise. He’s a good soldier.

No wonder Ben couldn’t cope.

Dave’s the one steadying presence in Klaus’s life, his lover and his guide. He hangs on Klaus’s every word, no matter how inane or ridiculous.

He looks at Klaus like a man who’s found an oasis in a desert, like the God-given answer to his prayers. His hands are devotional, running over him in fervent worship in the seedy backstreet of a Vietnamese nightclub. Klaus has never been loved like this, touched like this. He’s known pain and injury since he knew how to breathe, his earliest memories peppered with the thrum of experimental machinery, of bruises and slices from not dodging fast enough when sparring with Luther and Diego.

Even the last real relationship he’d had, those three lovesick weeks with the history professor who made ossobuco and had fancy paisley-patterned bedsheets, Klaus had still been nothing more than a quick fuck. The whole thing had gone sour anyway when the guy couldn’t face Klaus’s demons in the night.

But Dave is tender, and kind, and even though they both know loving a man out here could get you killed, so could anything else.

Klaus knows he’s settled so well in this life, _too_ well in this life. He’s not naive enough to believe that they’re immortal, after all, he’s had conversations with guys over breakfast who’d never made it to lunch, but he and Dave were _special_ , and God, didn’t the universe owe him _something_ after the hell it had put him through the last 29 years of life?

He screams for a medic, presses down hard on the gaping wound, but he’s seen so many awful injuries in his life he can tell pretty quickly which ones are the ones you don’t come back from.

There’s blood on his hands, so much blood, and once again in his goddamn life it’s not his own.

 

* * *

 

“He’s the only person I’ve ever truly loved more than myself,” he admits to Diego, and the words are bitter on his tongue. He wants to treat it like a throwaway line, like everything else he says, but he knows it’s the terrifying, unassailable truth. 

The Hargreeves family is not exactly famed for their listening ability, but the fact that his brother’s main response is ‘you’re luckier than most - when you lose someone, at least you can see them whenever you want’, well, that’s just the kicker.  The warm metal press of the dogtags over his heart is a constant reminder of his ongoing failure.

The world is too bright for him now, and even through the sickening haze of withdrawal, he can’t concentrate when he sees the concrete-and-glass shapes of the city. He sees screaming phantoms clawing at the edge of his consciousness every time he closes his eyes, but the only face he longs to dream of he can only find in peeling photos behind cracked perspex.

 

* * *

 

“He’s not ready for it,” Ben says in a piss-stained alleyway, a brick wall away from Luther and consequences and overwhelming temptation. Klaus has been through withdrawal enough times now to know he’s right in the worst stages of it now, the full-body cramps and sweat-slick delirium.

“Well, who is?” Klaus whines back.  “Was I? Were you?” He regrets the words as soon as they’ve left his mouth, and he tries to take them back, but he never was one for thinking before he spoke. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” _Sorry that this happened to you, that this happened to us, that the world seems desperate to snatch everything we love right out of our hands._

Ben’s hurt look is a familiar ache in Klaus’s chest, the ever-present reminder of the gaping hole in his life. 

 

* * *

 

Klaus is dead, finally, and ain’t that a way to go. Slamming your head on the floor of a rave, covered in the sticky liquor from scrambling across the floor for a pill. He had been trying to save his brother though, right before the end, and a tiny part of him felt vindicated, proud even, that he’d met his end being just that little bit heroic.

“To be blunt, I don’t really like you all that much,” God tells him, and he can’t even be surprised at that. She’s got a point, after all. He has been a bit of an asshole, historically.

“Hm,” he replies, that ache in his chest swelling. “Yeah, me neither.”

But she tells him there’s someone waiting for him, and his heart lights up with DAVE in big bright letters, the only saving grace about this whole situation.

He sits in the barber chair, trying desperately hard not to get too excited about seeing his lover again, the churning in his stomach riding that thin line between excitement and fear. But then he hears his father’s voice and he knows he’s in Hell. He should have been embracing Dave in the afterlife, the two of them holding hands and drinking whiskey, gazing out at a sun-soaked vista together.

But no. Reginald Hargreeves is instead disappointed, the only emotion Klaus had known his father ever emit in his direction, and he’s leaning in with a straight razor like some awful slasher movie. Klaus isn’t sure if he’s about to lose an ear or something, flinching involuntarily at the sight despite himself. Every touch his father gave him as a child ended up in pain somehow.

“You’re already dead,” his father tuts, like that’s supposed to make it all okay, and all Klaus can do is sit rigid in terror, let his father twist his head from side to side. But truth be told, the shave is the kindest touch he’s had from him, and Klaus can’t help but look to his father with pleading eyes.

Ever since he’d got the news, Klaus had fantasized about what he’d tell his father when he inevitably saw him again. Every iteration of it took the form of an angry diatribe, a heroic monologue about how Hargreeves had bought seven baby test subjects, seven little lab rats he gave numbers to and did whatever the fuck he liked to them.

“You were my greatest disappointment, Number Four,” his father says, and Klaus feels the fight in him drain away. He’d wanted to scream at him, tell him that he’d never forgive him for that night in the mausoleum or for putting them in danger, time after time after time. But hearing the circumstances of his father’s death, and how he’d sacrificed himself to bring them all back together again, Klaus can’t help but start to cry.

The last thing Klaus says to his father in the afterlife is ‘stay’ and ain’t that a bitch.

 

* * *

 

“Your blood’s too… polluted,” Pogo tells him, and the thought that Allison might die here on this table because of his actions is almost too much to bear. He can’t help her, and they don’t believe anything he says no matter how sober he is. Because he’s been sober for two days now, and all the world had to offer him was a rendezvous with his dearly departed daddy. If he can’t see Dave any more, and he can’t help his family, then really, _truly_ , what’s the fucking point?

He tears apart his room, drugs squirrelled away behind loose floorboards and deep inside soft toys. Ben’s furious, he always is when it comes to the drugs, and Klaus loves his brother, but he could honestly do without the lecture right now.

Klaus knows there’s only so many times his body can handle the pendulum swing between sobriety and another, stronger hit. But he’s tired of the constant failure and the horror of seeing the people he loves get hurt or worse. He’s tired of being so close to so much blood.

The scars across his body mark a treasure map of mistakes. Tiny shrapnel scars and rosy-red roadrash, a lifetime of being thrown to the ground by Academy training and the real world. The ivory line tracing across his jaw, almost invisible. The tattoos and the traintracks, the pockmarked puncture wounds scattered like a horrifying constellation across his body.

He’s so _tired._

And then Ben punches the pills right out of his mouth.

 

* * *

 

The truth of it was, there wasn’t some overpowered mook that took Ben out, that obliterated him before their eyes and sprayed his blood up the walls, and across their bodies.

“I lost control,” Ben confessed to Klaus one night, one of the bad nights where Klaus couldn’t find a bed and he’d hunched behind a dumpster in the rain, soaked through. It was one of those nights where Klaus had run out of witty things to say, figured Ben had been aiming for conciliatory but they were really just commiserating about their fucked-up lives.

Klaus had torn his unfocused gaze away from the grime-slick puddles on the ground, tilting the soggy piece of cardboard held over his head so the rain ran off to one side, and looked Ben in the eye. Klaus couldn’t remember when his brother had looked so earnest.

“I could feel the monster, that _thing_ , bursting out from inside me.” The icy trickle of rain down his back, the distant baritone hum of traffic. Klaus had always had his suspicions about that day, but they’d been forced to the locked dark room at the back of his mind, along with all the other terrible thoughts too awful to examine in the light.

“And I just…let it.” Hearing Ben say it out loud made it so much worse, and Klaus couldn’t stop the choked noise that rose in his throat. No amount of drugs could have numbed the sudden blood-chilling stomach drop that came with the confirmation of bad news. Klaus desperately wanted to comfort him, to pull his brother close into a tight embrace one last time, but even just reaching out his hand, he passed right through.

“I’m so sorry,” Klaus had said in the wavering silence, and they sobbed like little kids together, the kids they’d never gotten to be.

 

* * *

 

In a hail of gunfire tearing overhead, crouched among the red velvet folding chairs, Klaus summons his brother. Just like the old days, together with the rest of their siblings, they take out armed men across the auditorium. Pulling them down from vantage points, tossing them against the walls. The two of them back together again for the whole world to see, Number Four and Number Six, Klaus-and-Ben, best friends and confidantes.

“ _Please_ ,” Ben begs as they watch their siblings flinch under bullets grazing too close for comfort.

The thought of bringing Ben back into the world of the living just to use his power again makes Klaus’s skin crawl. _I’m just as bad as my father._

Ben had told him what death was really like that one long day he found himself bound and gagged in a motel closet, back before that long year away, body twisted up with that same burning, writhing pain of withdrawal.

“You know what the worst part of being dead is? You're stuck.” Ben’s words were like acid, but he’d always been the one to tell Klaus what he didn’t want to hear. “Nowhere to go. Nowhere to change.” Klaus could handle disappointing everyone else, but he’d wanted to do right by Ben, the one person who’d stuck by him no matter what. He knew he’d flirted with death too many times since Ben died, and back then, faced with the fact he might die for real at the hands of two assassins in a motel room, he figured he’d really rather live. Ben had twisted the knife anyway.

“That's the real torture, if you gotta know. Watching your brother take for granted everything you lost and pissing it all away.”

Klaus knows Ben has always hated his power, but the powerlessness of death weighs heavily on his mind. Given one last chance, one tiny infinitesimal shot at saving the world he’s grown quite fond of now, Klaus knows they have to _try._

His mind’s never been so clear.


End file.
